This came out earlier than I thought.
Interesting bits:
- 5150's shit Presence knob behavior (0-5 does nothing) is accurately emulated.
- You can change preamp tubes on the 5150 model, and it's an audible difference.
- On the Marshall model you can select between individual and bridged inputs, have a control for Volume 2 and something called "Attack" which was not shown.
- On the Vox AC30 model, the Middle knob can be used to blend between Top boost and non-Top boost. That's a pretty novel feature, though not very intuitive or discoverable. It also has some built in boost from the X controls, maybe a treble booster you can just easily toggle?
- Footswitching can be set up to do something akin to scenes where you can have e.g specific knobs at different settings and toggle between them without switching presets.
- Footswitching can also be set to toggle between two presets by pressing the same footswitch again. Nice for e.g rhythm vs lead tones.
- There's a big tempo LED.
- Tuner looks cool, it shows the tuning on the screen but also lights up the footswitches to indicate tuning. Very nice stage visibility feature.
- Seems they are now focusing a lot more on usability aspects, which is good.
Too bad they didn't show the effects editing here except for adjusting reverb.
I kinda get why it's the way it is, but it does feel already dated compared to things currently on the market and what's coming out in the digital modeler realm.
I just don't understand why they didn't use endless encoders for every control, because the position is basically never right, so reading the knob position makes no sense. Plus you can't really read those knobs easily on stage either even on the Amp 1 - I can basically see the channel selection and main master volume position.
I think they just like the "grab the control and turn it to where you want" where you don't need to deal with shit like acceleration curves to get the feel of the knobs right.